Best Practices During Canvas Outages

We understand that the Canvas outage impacts teaching, learning, grading, and access to course materials, and we appreciate your patience as our vendors work to restore their services.

While we do not anticipate additional outages, we encourage instructors to review the interim guidance below to prepare for potential disruptions should they arise.

Alternative Ways to Communicate with Students

Communicate with students through alternative methods, Microsoft Teams or Course Email list.

1. Create a Microsoft Team for your course via Canvas: Within Teams, instructors can chat and share content with students outside of Canvas.
   • Canvas. Follow these steps to enable Microsoft Teams in your Canvas courses.
     • https://servicedesk.its.msstate.edu/TDClient/45/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2316 
2. Create a course email list in Banner.
   • In Banner, instructors can request the creation of a course email list for their course roster to more easily communicate with students enrolled in their course. Please follow the instructions at the link below to set up class email lists in Banner. Once the request is submitted, it will take overnight or up to 24 hours for the list to be created.
     • https://servicedesk.its.msstate.edu/TDClient/45/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1726 

Share Materials

1. Within Course Team (step 1 of Communicate with Students) share course content via Shared. ONLY students enrolled in the course will have access to this team and its content.

• https://servicedesk.its.msstate.edu/TDClient/45/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=1643#sharing_files 

Student Download Canvas Content

1. Canvas has the ability for Canvas course content to be downloaded to your device as an HTML file. This is especially useful when you know you will be offline but still want to review course materials. Faculty are encouraged to share this information with students.  Instructions for downloading Canvas course content are available at the link below:
   • https://servicedesk.its.msstate.edu/TDClient/45/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2310
2. Canvas Mobile App
   • The offline feature of Canvas Mobile App is available for the student mobile app and can be found behind a feature flag. Institutions that choose to utilize this feature will give students the opportunity to download certain parts of their courses and access that content through the Canvas Student App.
     • https://servicedesk.its.msstate.edu/TDClient/45/Portal/KB/ArticleDet?ID=2312

We appreciate your patience during these vendor service outages. For questions with any of these solutions, please contact the ITS Service Desk at 662.325.0631 or servicedesk.msstate.edu